I was at the RT Convention in Chicago last week and had SUCH a good time. You should have been there!  Books and readers and authors everywhere!  It's like book nirvana!

I was lucky enough to take part in a very cool workshop with the delightful Ann Voss Peterson and Molly O'Keefe.  It was so much fun!  We were each given 15 minutes to discuss writing big character, plot, or emotion in small books--meaning category romance novels of roughly 50--75 thousand words.  I talked about emotion, and here's my little lecture:

EL Doctorow said: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

That’s what you’re going for when you’re trying to write big emotion in a small book.  You want to create a thunderstorm between your reader’s hands, so that she thinks she might need an umbrella as she’s reading your book in her living room.  You need to make that emotion NAKED and REAL.  Jennifer Crusie writes in an essay called “Emotionally Speaking: Romance Fiction in the Twenty-First Century,” which you can read on her website, “All you have to do is convince the modern, jaded, ironic reader that your heroine and hero have not only fallen in love and surmounted all the barriers in their path, but that their love is unconditional and will last throughout time. You must, in short, give your reader not only good narrative, but also great emotional satisfaction.” 

And you have to do it in very few words.

We live in a culture that’s very uneasy with emotion.  We don’t like displays or scenes.  We don’t like the screaming child in the grocery aisle—especially if he’s ours.  We certainly don’t like the dramatic teenager, wailing out her pain into her cell phone for all the world to hear—we’re certain we never acted that way.  We don’t like those weird, too-mushy couples on Facebook who treat their status updates like foreplay.  We don’t like that group one table over who are laughing WAY TOO LOUD.  We don’t like it when our leaders show emotion—we find it suspicious, we think they’re faking for attention, or we thereafter think they’re weak.  We get snarky on the internet and tear each other down, and some of us, when we were younger, hid our romance novels in the closet while featuring our Great Literary Tomes on the bookshelf in the living room, lest anyone suspect us of being schmaltzy and silly.  We’re embarrassed to cry in public, no matter what the provocation.  We’re told to lock it up, to tamp it down, to keep our dirty laundry private.  Emotion isn’t safe.  It’s dangerous and unwieldy and no one knows quite what to do with it. 

Except in romance novels.  In romance novels, emotion is everything.  Virginia Kantra said that, “The wounded hero or the tortured heroine are sources of emotion. Obviously, serious situations can evoke strong reactions and compel strong emotions. And it is the emotional "hit" that readers are often looking for when they pick up a romance.”

And in category romances in particular, emotion is the spice that keeps your readers coming back for more, desperate for the dish only a category romance can serve. Did I take that metaphor too far?  Well, you can’t go too far in these shorter books.  Pushing boundaries and digging deeper into the emotional complexities of your characters is what these books are all about.  Category romance readers WANT the roller coaster of that emotion.  They want to be taken on a ride, which means that while the space is smaller, the emotional payoff has to be huge.  I think of writing shorter books like these like a punch.  And readers really, really want that hit. 

Some category books are deeply grounded in the familiar—or, more likely, talented authors’ very clever representations of readers’ fantasies about the familiar—while others are deliberately over the top.  Whether you’re writing about a teacher in a small town in the American heartland, a 500 year old vampire, or a billionaire playboy prince, the reader will follow you anywhere as long as the EMOTION is real.  The wilder the scenario, the more relatable the emotion must be. 

The deepest, most resonant kind of emotion comes organically from your characters.  You’ll map out the surface of your characters’ emotional raw spots as you start to figure out their story.  And emotion follows naturally from well-thought-out characters and a good plot.  Ask yourself WHO these people are.  If your heroine is bookish and reclusive, while your hero is more the rakish, playboy type, what will it mean to each of them to find themselves so attracted to someone who seems to force them out of their comfort zones?  What would it mean for a woman who has always hated casual sex and dating and all of that shallow nonsense—who has prided herself on her immunity to all of those plastic men—to find herself falling for one?  What will that make her think about herself?  Feel?  How will she react when she finds that her heart and her body are betraying her? 

Look beyond the simple.  A great exercise to try to figure out how to dig deep into emotion and learn how to layer your characters is to take the cliché you hate the most in all the romances you’ve read.  Secret baby, marriage of convenience, whatever.  We all can’t stand something.  Take yours and really, really think about it.  Really try to live inside the characters and the conflict inherent in whatever that cliché is. 

Here’s an example:  I wrote a book for a continuity series last year called The Notorious Wolfes, and I was assigned Lucas Wolfe, the playboy Wolfe brother who romances starchy business woman Grace. 

So, first of all, I HATE playboys.  I live in Los Angeles, which is a city teeming with playboy types of all descriptions.  You can see them in their ridiculous man-toy cars, squiring their near-adolescent girlfriends here and there, filled to the brim with smugness and self-congratulatory self-regard.  They’re vile.  They are anything but heroes.  Also, who wants to sleep with the guy who sleeps with a different woman every night?  It grosses me out.  But Lucas was the hero I’d been given, so I had to make it work.

The first time my heroine, the self-made and highly self-protective Grace Carter, lays eyes on Lucas, he’s behaving appallingly with a married woman in the middle of a public party.  Obviously, she is not impressed.  (Neither was I.)  But just as obviously, there’s something about Lucas that keeps her up all night, thinking about him. 

It’s not just that he’s stunningly gorgeous (though he is).  It’s not just that he comes from a very famous, very scandal-ridden family (though he does).  It’s not even that several tabloids keep themselves in paparazzi and speculation thanks to Lucas’s antics (though, clearly, they do).  There’s something else, something more, or a woman like Grace, who deals in famous and important people all the time without so much as blinking, would never be the slightest bit intrigued.  And unfortunately for her and the careful life she’s built for herself, she is entirely too fascinated by a man she ought to find repulsive.

So I started to think about why Lucas was the way he was. If I started from the premise that this was a man that tough and dedicated Grace would fall in love
with, could she only see the real him, I knew that Lucas had to be as smart as she was.  And as quick, and as capable, and as loyal and stalwart.  So why would a man who was all of these things go to such great lengths to hide it?  From the world, from his family, even from himself?  Why would he make it a point to live down to every low expectation thrown his way?  Who would act like that?

Once I got that, I got him.

I urge you to try this on your own.  The fact is, what we call romance clichés are actually stories that work, over and over again, if the characters are real.  How do you make them real?  By digging until you figure out how they work, what makes them tick, what makes them people you can not only admire, but actively want a happy-ever-after for.  You have to understand what it feels like to be these characters, because you have to put it on the page.  If you don’t understand them, your reader won’t, either, and you’ve lost her.

So how do we do that?

I don’t know what it feels like to find myself in a marriage of convenience with a seething, oddly compelling sheikh who wants me only for my father’s money.  But I do know what it feels like to feel overwhelmed by my emotional commitments.  To feel in too, deep—over my head.  Drowning, even.  I know what it feels like to feel as if I’m going through the motions.  I know, too, what it feels like to believe that the people I love desperately aren’t seeing me for me, aren’t seeing who I am, aren’t seeing what I have to give.  I know what it feels like to feel lost in the choices I’ve made. 

I write Harlequin Presents, home of over-the-top luxury, alpha males, and what may seem, to the casual observer, like a far-fetched scenario or two.  Maybe you’ve found yourself a secretary to a brooding billionaire dripping in supermodels and Aston Martins, who one fine night in Rio awakens a fire in you that can never be tamed?  No?  Well, if you’ve never experienced that, how do you write about that scenario in a way that makes all those things that seem outrageous from the outside feel real to the reader as she’s deep inside your story?  The key is to dive as deep as you can into the emotion—to find the emotional reality of the situation and really dig into it.  I know that when I fell in love with my husband, I thought he was the most magical, amazing, fantastic man in the world.  I couldn’t figure out why he was interested in someone like me when, it seemed to me, he could have picked anyone!  That’s the same emotion our secretary in Rio feels.  That same wonder and terror, that same joy, and that same sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that it can’t possibly be real, he can’t really love me, I can’t let myself fall too far here or I’ll end up prostrate on the floor…

Think of emotion as the volume of the scene.   The higher the emotional intensity, the louder the scene, the more riveted the reader.

But that's easy to say.  How do you show emotion, rather than tell it?  We can all write "she was sad" or "she was so mad at him she wanted to scream” or “she was really attracted to him.”  Yawn.

How do you show these things?   One of the easiest—and most effective—means of showing emotion is by utilizing body language—which I can tell you as someone who teaches a lot of creative writing classes, can be very difficult to get a handle on.  It's not just gestures, or facial expressions, though those are important.  We can all control our facial expressions and our gestures, to some extent.  Or we can try.  Showing your characters’ gestures and facial expressions are clues to what they’re going through.  But you can’t simply record each moment their face moves: he frowned, she bit her lip, he scowled, she tightened her lips.  That’s all well and good—those help layer your scenes.  But what about what we can't control?   Showing those things is the key to showing emotion in a scene.  

You need to be deep in a character's POV and experiencing her emotions with her.  She wants to smile, to play it off, but her stomach twists in agony.  Her shoulders are knotted high behind her neck.  Her heart is beating too loud, too fast.  There are tears building up behind her eyes.   Her throat aches from the effort of keeping a scream of anguish trapped inside.  The more details like this that surround the intense conversation, the more the reader is IN the intense conversation--and swept away.

Another exercise you can try at home is to create a scenario—yes, another one.  For example, let’s say that your main character today is a princess named Desdemona who has just been auctioned off for marriage to a seemingly hateful Italian financial wizard named Vito by her autocratic grandfather, who she has always tried so hard to please.  Let’s say Desdemona is very upset as she is being led down the aisle toward her groom, who was, in her opinion, vile to her last night at the dinner she was forced to endure.  Desdemona is definitely not happy.  You’ll want to write down three descriptions of Desdemona’s emotional state.  Push yourself to be creative.  Do not use words like “sad,” or “angry.”  Think to yourself: I am not TELLING my reader that Desdemona is in a bad way here, I am DRAWING HER IN, making her FEEL WHAT DESDEMONA FEELS.  Then make up a totally different scenario, and do it again.  Figure out how to talk about HOW IT FEELS and not just WHAT IT IS she’s feeling.

When I want to study really emotional writing, I usually bury myself in a stack of really great paranormal romances.  Nalini Singh’s, for example, since as far as I’m aware she can do no wrong.  Paranormals are great to study, because they make all the metaphors real.  Do you feel like you might die, you love him so much?  Well, in a paranormal, you very well might, as it’s likely he’s some kind of scary thing with fangs who might chomp on you.  Paranormal characters have the advantage on non-paranormal ones in this sense, because when they get angry, they can literally let out the beast within in the middle of a fight.  You want to do the same in your writing, which may or may not feature supernatural creatures.

So what do you do if your characters can't change into werewolves and battle it out with their teeth?  Sex is one obvious answer, and often the right one in a romance novel.  Sometimes a situation is so intense, so painful, that the characters lose their ability to do anything but touch each other—to lose themselves in the one thing they haven’t seemed to ruin with the weight of their issues, the one thing they can’t deny.  I’m talking about angsty sex here, which is the only kind my characters seem to have, but depending on the line you’re targeting, you can do the same with sweeter sex, happier sex, or even a really, really life-altering kiss.  Or all of the above.

What if sex seems too obvious?  For more emotionally hard-hitting solutions, try a small, exquisitely painful conversation.  Or worse, a moment ripe with emotion yet without words.  A touch.  A look.  Something that leaves both characters gasping for breath and wounded.  Ouch.   The reader will be in just as much pain.

Strong emotion takes over the body.  It needs to take over the characters, too.  The most obvious form of bodily action-as-emotion is the sex scene.  But to really layer emotion throughout a book, ALL scenes should benefit from that kind of attention to physical detail.  Never be afraid to go back and layer these physical details into a scene, to really build it out, so the reader reads the book with her heart in her mouth, and can't let go of the story for a long time after she's finished it.  You might find that these really heavy, hard-hitting emotional books take a toll on you, the writer.  You may find that dredging up all that darkness inside of you, all of your insecurities and fears and the things you’d be humiliated if anyone knew you entertained at three am in the dark, kind of wrecks you.  It should.  These books are extraordinary.  They are powerful.  If you find yourself a little destroyed by the places you go in your books, you’re probably doing it right.  Because the more emotional your book, the more emotional you'll make your readers, and the more they'll find you absolutely addictive.  Tessa Shapcott, Senior Executive Editor at Mills & Boon, said, “We have a unique understanding of how women operate emotionally.  Our writers tap into thoughts you don’t admit to having.  And the fact is, you can think like that.  You can!  And you won’t die!”

So let’s recap:

• Push boundaries and dig deeper into your characters’ emotions
• The wilder the scenario, the more relatable the emotions should be.
  • And if you’re not writing some wild scenario?  That’s okay.  Make sure you nail down the emotional truths of whatever scenario you’re writing about.  Figure out what’s universal, what we all feel, what we all relate to.  That’s what you want to explore.
• The most resonant emotion comes directly from your characters and their conflicts.  It should be organic, natural.  That’s what makes it hurt!
• Find the emotional reality of the scene, then dig into its layers. 
• Think of emotion as the volume of the scene.  Then turn it up.
• Use body language—not just what characters do with their facial expressions (frown, smile, laugh, glare) but what their bodies feel like to them as they experience these strong emotions (heart pounding, palms damp, knot in stomach, shifting, fidgeting).  Are they light headed?  Off-balance?  Does she cry when she’s furious?  Does he want to punch the wall? 
• Go deep.  Inside yourself, inside your characters.  And remember, you can’t have light without dark.  It follows that the darker the night of the soul the characters go through, the brighter the light of the sunny day that follows.  We are all of us deeply emotional creatures.  All you have to do is capture that and put it on the page.  Dig deeper, always.  Don’t be afraid of the dark.  Earn the sun. 

You can do it.

This is very cool.

An old friend of mine got in touch with me not long ago to tell me that her book club wanted to read I LOVE THE 80s for their upcoming meeting.  This necessitated books shipped from England, which I signed, and then sent back.  

This is how the books were presented to the book club readers:



And here are the books with a little Caitlin Crews gift that I sent along:



And here's the really fun part.  All the ladies dressed up in 80s clothes to celebrate the book!  Check out all these totally tubular fashions from back in the day:




Makes me wish I could have flown across the country to join in myself!

Happy reading, and happy 80s, ladies!

Recently I handed in my latest book.  It happened to be my tenth Harlequin Presents and my twenty-first published/soon-to-be published book.

That's a lot of books.

Some days, it's hard for me to even begin to process how lucky I am.  I get to do the thing I love most in the world!  As my job!  My career.  That's incredible!  And unlike many, I get to do it all day, every day.  There were a lot of years, before I sold my first book in 2003, that that seemed impossible.  Or unlikely, anyway.  Who was a writer?  As, like, a job?  No one I knew.  I still get a little wild with joy when I think about how this all happened.  Other days, usually when the current book isn't going well and I'm quite certain that it's the one that will finally end my career, I'm less incandescent with joy and more grimly determined to just get a few more words on the page and let's hope they're not terrible--but I still get to write.  And I never, ever forget what a gift that is.

There are six books ahead of me that I know about--one I'm in the middle of already and then five more lined up behind it, yet to be written.  Books stretching toward the horizon, stories for me to tell, each one its own individual mountain to climb, and who knows what scrapes and bruises and even scars I'll accumulate along the way?  So far I've found that the more books I write, the more likely it is that I'll climb down the other side of that mountain--but it's never certain.

In celebration of all of this, and a little bit of Thanksgiving spirit, too, here are ten things I've learned about writing over the course of my ten Harlequins:

1.  Category romance novels are very, very hard to write well.  And also fun!  But first: hard. 
I think every writer should write at least one.  Just to experience what "churning those books out"* is like.  Hint: not like churning. 

[Imagine if I told you that you needed to sit down and write a captivating, engrossing, heartwrenching/warming love story, featuring two characters who are wholly themselves--complete individuals with their own histories and issues and needs, all of which will complement and complicate each other.  And then I told you that you had to make sure these characters and their stories fit within certain guidelines.  But that you needed to make sure you used those guidelines to make the story your own!  And that you had to do it all in roughly 50,000 words.  And that those 50,000 words had to involve a satisfying love story that should, if you did it well, make your reader's heart pound as she raced to the end, possibly staying up half the night because she had to see what happened.  Oh, yes, and that "the end" had to not only tie up all the emotions of the book, but fully satisfy your reader that your two characters are destined to live out the rest of their lives together.  Happily. 

Go ahead and do that.  I'll wait. 

Oh, yes--and make sure you do all of this in an extremely short span of time.  I know you blocked out three or four months to write the book, but things happen, don't they?  You have one month, possibly slightly less.  Make sure the book you produce is up to standard!]

*Resist the urge to use this phrase on your friendly neighborhood category romance writer!  It will make her fume and think unkind thoughts about you, I promise.

2.  You must write the book in order to have written the book.
Just do it!  (It's a great slogan because it's true.)  Just sit down and write.  Even if it feels like your keyboard is made of glass shards and your words are terrible and everyone will point and laugh should they ever read this tripe, which of course they won't, because who would publish anything this wretched?  Even if all of that is true (which is unlikely), you can edit it later.  Tomorrow, perhaps, when your mood improves and you've had more chocolate.  But first you must write. 

3.  Your process is your process, and beating yourself up because you don't have Writer X's process--which, from the outside, looks so reasonable and thoughtful and calm and balanced and  CORRECT--is actually just a form of procrastination.
I, for example, wish that I wrote concise outlines of each chapter, broken down by scene, that I could reference each day as I arrived at my desk at precisely 7am and started the day's work.  I wish that I could write like an engine, fueled by the power of my creativity, barreling through hours and pages, uninterrupted by trips around the whole of the internet or the need to carefully craft "book mixes" in iTunes.  I wish that every time I opened up a document and placed my hands on my keyboard, a veritable river of genius poured forth, and I had only to keep up with it. 

Alas, this is not how I work.  And instead of wasting fruitless hours wishing it was, I could be, you know... actually working.  The way I work.  Which looks a whole lot less disciplined and productive but at the end of the day, gets the job done.  What else matters?

4.  Read.  Watch.  Become a story slut.
Everything.  Books.  Poems.  Television shows and movies.  Articles your Aunt Hildegard sends you from her local newspaper.  Random documentaries on the History Channel in the middle of the night.  New books.  Old books.  Books you loved when you were eleven.  Books you can't understand why so many others love.  Books that are like yours, but completely fail to do what you're trying to do.  Books that are like yours, except so much better that you think you might cry.  Dramas, comedies, tragedies.  Whole television series on DVD.  Fiction and fact.  Newspapers.  Blogs.  Opinions.  Rants.  Letters.  Old diaries.  Reality shows.  Dreadful made-for-cable movies.  Every single re-run season of every single procedural drama on every single channel.  You can never read widely enough, watch enough, infuse yourself in enough story.  But you can try.

5.  Fill the well.
Take a walk.  Take a trip.  Spend long afternoons doing absolutely nothing that could ever be construed as work, by anyone.  Look at flowers, trees, the sky, the sea.  Shop for one absolutely perfect item of clothing that transforms your mood and makes you feel stunning.  Go to some breathlessly fancy shop and try on all the architecturally adventurous shoes.  Go to a library.  Visit your local museums.  Sit quietly in the woods.  Walk through the nearest town.  Spend a few hours in the nearest coffee shop, wasting time like a teenager.  Enjoy your family.  Cook something completely new to you.  Live in the world.  Explore it.  Day-dream.  Imagine.

6.  Celebrate your accomplishments.
A milestone deserves a celebration, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant to anyone else.  Allow yourself to celebrate the things you do.  Revel in the moment.  Sometimes that's all you have--but if you let it, it's enough.

7.  There is no shortage of words.
So if they are not coming to you, it's your approach that needs work, because the words are there, just out of reach.  Switch it up.  If you're linear, write out of sequence.  If you like to wait for the muse to visit, spend a few days treating yourself far more sternly.  Write other things--extremely long blog posts, eight hundred tweets, unnecessarily detailed emails to your friends.  See?  No shortage of words.  At some point, you'll find the ones you need, and use them the way you should. 

8.  What you experience while writing this book is not what readers will experience when they read it.
Agony hits the page and looks effortless.  I know this from quizzing other, better writers, all of whom claim to have just as much trouble with their work as I do.

I know, I'm skeptical too. 

Here's what I tell myself.  (I find this comforting, but I also think it's fun to scour the internet for bad reviews of my work, because I like reading what readers who will never enjoy my work have to say about it, so your mileage may vary): You may never be able to read this book again without wincing, but so what?  Your book isn't for you, it's for your readers.  Think about that one scene, that sentence, that chapter that you managed to get exactly the way you wanted it, and be still.

9.  The solution to most of your writer angst is simple:  Finish the book.  Then write another.
You can only do the best that you can with the time and the tools that you have at any given time.  Only that.  And if you feel that falls short of what you'd like to be accomplishing, you can try to do it better next time. 

Don't think: this book has to be perfect.  It won't be.  Think instead: this book should be better than the one before it, and the next book should be better than this. 

And then try as hard as you can to make that happen.

10.  This is a love story, not a life sentence.
Sure, it's hard.  Like anything else that matters.  Focus on the joy. 

You get to write.  You get to create worlds and play with them.  You get to do this thing that no one else in the entire world can do, and no one else in the entire world ever will do: tell your story, your way, in your own words and for your very own readers who will, I promise you, love it. 

If there's a happier ending than that, I don't know it.

This post is brought to you in advance of the inevitable Halloween party pictures that you thought would be cute because you were rocking all that zombie make up, only to discover that you should have rethought the heat factor in your friend's packed apartment that made you look like an actual corpse who feasts upon human flesh:

I believe that everyone has the right to request that unflattering photos of themselves be removed from the internet.

I have certainly been guilty of putting up photos of friends, believing with all my heart that the photos were adorable, only to have them express deep horror that I would inflict said pictures on the unwary.  The minute they mention this to me, I take down the picture.  

I have also found myself happily flipping through pictures of some event, only to encounter a shot of myself apparently auditioning for the role of Sea Hag.  Yikes.  When this happens, I have no qualm whatsoever asking the person who posted it to remove it.

There are people that may think that this is high maintenance, or somehow insulting to the photographer.  That you should, I don't know, suffer in silence with the knowledge that a picture of you with spinach in your teeth is being viewed by all 900 of your friend's Facebook friends.  I disagree.

Life is short. The internet is forever. 

I would rather be thought high maintenance than have to live my life with the knowledge that somewhere, right now, someone is looking at that horrifying picture of me with the seventeen chins.

Just ask them to take it down.

And have a happy Halloween!

I originally wrote this post for The Girlfriends Book Club blog, but don't let that stop you. It applies just as much today--at least, it does to my writing!


Last night I locked myself in my office after a very long and frazzling day of a thousand errands that had to be done right that very minute and settled in to get some writing done. And I did. I am nothing if not capable of forcing myself to do things I find unpleasant which, I must tell you, was certainly how I would describe sitting down to start the day's writing at 9pm.

I knew exactly what scene I wanted to write, and I attacked it with gusto. Yes! Gusto! It was when I found myself describing the ornamentation of the set of candlesticks atop the fireplace mantel in unusual (and wholly unnecessary) detail that I had to stop and admit something to myself that I already knew: the scene was not working. At all.

My first clue was the fact that I'd spent paragraphs upon paragraphs waxing rhapsodic about the decor. I am writing a category romance. While details of the hero's lavish wealth are always a part of the line for which I write, there are details that set the scene and help ground the emotions of the characters in the world I've made for them, and there are... rhapsodic descriptions of candles neither character would ever notice in a million years, so busy are they falling in love and failing to admit that to themselves or each other.

My second and more pertinent clue was the fact that what I was writing felt like the typing equivalent of slogging through waist-deep mud. Every. Single. Word. About. The. Freaking. Candles. HURT. I found myself online, researching the kinds of candlesticks that might be present in an eighteenth century London townhouse. Excellent information to have, were I writing a historical romance novel. As it happens, I am not.

At some point I gave up. I staggered off to bed and collapsed into it, entertaining the usual litany in my head: my career is over, I will never finish this book, I have no idea how to write books anymore, this book (number 21, more or less) is harder than all the ones that came before--all of which now seem, in my memory, to have been written in a great gleaming burst of easy and delightful creativity...

That made for restful sleep. And then I woke up this morning and faced the obvious: I'd started the scene in the wrong place. I had to throw out all my work (and my genius observations about candlesticks) and start over.

The minute I admitted that to myself, the truth about the scene itself became clear to me. I didn't need that scene at all, in fact. It was a time-waster--merely going over things that I'd either already made clear or would make clear in future. Once I accepted that, ideas for the scene I should have been writing all along began to come fast and furious. I could hardly keep up!

So this is my advice to you:

1. Pay attention to the candlesticks. Or whatever it is you find yourself writing on and on and on about, that has nothing at all to do with either the emotional growth of your characters or the forward momentum of your plot.

2. If you hate the candlesticks while you're writing way too much about them, it's probably because you should be writing something else instead. Stop, regroup, and let go. This can be hard, particularly when you're writing feverishly to a deadline and cutting out a day's writing can throw you behind schedule. But if you can cut, you should cut. And your book will be better for it, I promise. Though you may need a lot of caffeine to get you through the sleepless nights as you race to get back on track. Still worth it!

3. Sometimes you need the candlesticks to get you where you need to go. I don't believe that there is any wasted writing. Did I really need pages and pages of swooning observations about the decor? Well, no. But I needed to write those pages. I needed to head off down the wrong path for a while, so I could see the right path so clearly. Maybe I worked out the right scene in my subconscious while I was nattering on about the mantelpiece. Maybe I figured out what my characters should have been doing while they were... not doing it. But one thing I know is always true about writing books, even the bad scenes you throw away? The only way out is through. Sad but true.

4. If writing was easy, it wouldn't be fun. Or so I like to tell myself. Daily.

(Oh, and by all means, ask me anything you need to know about candlesticks. I'm now an expert!)

Megan Crane is the author of more than twenty novels, almost all of which went off the rails at one point or another. Usually more than once. She also teaches writing, as she likes to opine at length about how to write novels and then fail to take her own advice. You can find out more about her at www.megancrane.com.

1. I have literally read every single thing on the internet today. Every. Single. Thing. This is how much I am actively avoiding writing my book. And incidentally? There is a lot of really boring stuff out there. But there is also a lot of really fun stuff that everyone knows all about except me, which leads me to:

2. I don't watch Saturday Night Live. I never really have. I have vague memories of being sent off to bed while my older brother watched SNL back in the day, and then of that particular SNL when Jon Bon Jovi sauntered out circa 1995 and sang "Bed of Roses" with his hair cut short and he was so hot my friend K. and I fell off her couch onto the very hardwood floor of her NYC studio apartment--but that's about it. That is why I've never even heard of Lonely Island. Until today. Aside from the obvious Justin Timberlake songs that everyone heard of when they happened. These are my favorite non-JT songs:





Who knew Michael Bolton was funny? Well, all of you who didn't discover Lonely Island this very afternoon, I guess.

3. DID I MENTION THIS BOOK I SHOULD BE WRITING? It is due soon. Very, very soon. VERY. SOON. As this is just the way my life is these days, I should probably start accepting that this is how it is and adjust accordingly, rather than conducting my life as if it is one never-ending crisis...

That might involve less surfing the internet aimlessly while procrastinating and more actual writing, or so I assume. I'll have to look into it and get back to you.

It's been a long summer.

I wrote a lot, but that's not new. I finally took a vacation or two, which is.

I went to Australia. I went to Black Rock City. Both trips were life-changing, and so good it kind of hurt, for a whole host of different and over-lapping reasons.

Now it's September which should mean the fall--not that you can tell from the inferno-like weather here in Los Angeles--and I have more books to write, epiphanies to sort, and all the rest of the good things that come after a few really, really good if sometimes challenging months.

Here's a picture in lieu of a thousand words:



"We all have wings, but some of us don't know why."--INXS

More soon.